Tag: Atlanta BeltLine

Entrance to PCM from the BeltLine is just across from the Ford Factory Lofts and south of the Ponce de Leon Avenue Bridge.

Five hundred people showed up for the first Art on the Atlanta BeltLine lantern parade in 2010. Carrying homemade lights, they tromped up the dirt path between the dumpsters and hills of kudzu that, not long ago, dotted the Eastside Trail.

In 2001 Kit Sutherland and her husband bought a condo on Glen Iris Drive, then a quiet street known for, well, not much. Today it’s at the epicenter of three projects that have permanently changed the entire city: the Atlanta BeltLine, Historic Fourth Ward Park, and Ponce City Market.

Five years ago, when Melanie Furr found a neighbor’s cat toying with a chipmunk, she rescued the injured creature and brought it to the Atlanta Wild Animal Rescue Effort.

As a boy, Gregory Burson Sr., 62, remembers catching tadpoles in a swamp behind his grandmother’s backyard in Peoplestown.

“If you live near Piedmont Park or the Eastside Trail of the Atlanta BeltLine, you might feel, ‘Oh, this is fantastic, why would we want more?’” says Amy Phuong. Yet just 6 percent of our land is dedicated to park space.

The peppering of new spots along the Eastside Trail has me itching to get outside.

Sometimes restaurants have a lot going for them—just not all going at the same speed. Last Word, in the Old Fourth Ward, is one of them. It’s trying to do a lot: bring craft cocktails to a level of housemade everything, build a menu reminiscent of the co-owner’s native Lebanon and also the Maghreb countries of Morocco and Tunisia, and include late-night plates to complement the ambitious drinks.

When I graduated from college in 1991, it felt like half of the guys I knew growing up were moving to Atlanta. We were from a small town in upstate New York, and back then, before Al Gore invented the Internet, reports of life in Atlanta trickled up through limited filters: from newspaper stories about the mad preparations for the Olympics, from the ubiquitous Braves games on TBS, but mostly from friends themselves, who would visit home at Christmas, like evangelizers anointed by the Chamber of Commerce.

Disco. Hipster. Kosher. Murder. Atlantans have a penchant for nicknaming their Kroger stores. That last moniker was bestowed on the Ponce de Leon Avenue location after a deadly 1991 shooting in its parking lot. The name has stuck; there’s even a Twitter handle.